Speed Dating Round Four Wrap Up

I learned a few things for next time. If I know for sure I'm already going to read the book (Adler and Theroux), putting it in a speed dating pile is useless. Next time I'll only pick books I'm uncertain about.

Not that it was that great, just easy to read, almost all conversations between lovers. I got reprimanded by a friend who says this is not the era of Roth to start with. Can you really read the wrong book? Probably not. I liked it enough to try something else by him.

Books I will continue reading:

Wild Thorns by Sahar Khalifeh
This will go quickly and there are so few books set in the Palestinian areas bordering Israel, and this one is a long-lost son coming home to the West Bank, with the intent of working against the government.

I can't say I'm really enjoying this, but it reads quickly and I'm already at 67 or so. Of course, so far all that has really happened is a butler talking about what makes a good butler. This won the Booker Prize in 1989, so I'll finish it on principle. Not quite as engaging as Never Let Me Go.

Abandoned, with the reasons, R.I.P.

Hammered (Jenny Casey #1) by Elizabeth Bear
Meh to space mercenaries. Just not into it.

Virtual Light by William Gibson
I love some Gibson but this one was too much about info-dump and I couldn't get into it. It allowed me to dump two books from my to-read shelf, since I had the second book in the trilogy on hand.

4 comments:

Glad you're sticking with The Remains of the Day. It gets more interesting and, if I remember it correctly, it's really about memory and Stevens's self-deception. Is the world as we remember it really the world as it was? As it becomes clear, the answer is no. I loved this book when I read back in 1989, before I ever heard of the Booker Prize. I stumbled into the book since Ishiguro was at the local bookstore for a reading and on an impulse I went -- I still have my copy.